FORESTSCAN

ESA’s upcoming Biomass mission will deliver valuable P-band SAR data aimed at forest aboveground biomass (AGB) estimation across the humid tropics. Additionally, the current NASA GEDI mission on the International Space Station (LiDAR), the NASA NISAR and JAXA ALOS-4 (L-band SAR) will widen our possibilities to estimate AGB from space. However, all these missions rely on calibration and validation data derived from field-plots. Which needs to be scalable across the typically hectare-scale satellite sensor footprints.

The ForestScan project will investigate novel technologies such as Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-based Laser Scanning (UAV-LS) to complement manual plot based measurements of AGB by collecting and analysing such data for three tropical sites in French Guiana (Paracou), Gabon (Lopé) and Malayisa (Sepilok). In addition at each of these sites airborne laser scanning data is available.

The specific objectives of the study are (i) the development of a protocol for acquiring such measurements in tropical forests; (ii) analysing scaling properties of forest structure in tropical forests and (iii) high precision limited area measurement (plot census, TLS and UAV-LS) with wide area airborne laser scanning.

Ultimately this effort will support the systematic collection and understanding of reference data for biomass product validation as required for the CEOS Good Practices Guideline (Duncanson et al., 2021, DOI:10.5067/doc/ceoswgcv/lpv/agb.001).